Transforming Waste Heat to Electric Power in Oil and Gas Compression Systems using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

In the oil and gas sector, energy is wasted far too often. By recovering those losses and increasing efficiency, the operators of production facilities and transmission systems can make dramatic improvements and yield new commercial opportunities. For instance, energy recovery may potentially allow profits to be realized from fields that might otherwise be marginal prospects or represent an additional revenue stream for gas pipeline transmission and distribution network operators. Now, a breakthrough technology that supports energy recovery from heat rejected from a broad range of industrial processes is available to the oil and gas industry. There is a lot of wasted energy available. Globally, it is estimated that rejected heat corresponds to about 65% of the net energy input across the industrial infrastructure, with numbers varying from 60% to 70% depending on the region, including the Middle East. Considerable waste heat is ejected from equipment like the gas turbines that are commonly used in mechanical drive applications found in the compression processes of gas production platforms and transmission pipelines. While most gas turbine heat recovery systems use a bottoming steam cycle to improve thermal efficiency, so-called combined cycle turbines, the new development presented in this paper is significantly different.